While it’s not quite there yet, Los Alamos will one day be a tourist attraction, to be visited like the Grand Canyon, after which people can stop at the gift shop a purchase their own faux plutonium nugget.

The Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos opened a new exhibit Friday to help the National Park Service scale that roadblock to providing visitors with the full range of experiences meant to showcase the history of the Atomic Age. Manhattan on the Mesa, an interactive exhibit, takes visitors “behind the fence” to five buildings within the Los Alamos lab’s Technical Area 18, which until 2005 had been storing sensitive nuclear weapons material.

The lab and the Energy Department funded the project, in partnership with New Mexico Highlands University’s Program in Interactive Cultural Technology. Students in the Highlands program used their technical expertise to create a “virtual tour” of the off-limit areas, a task that required some students to don protective clothing and make a real visit to the sites and film them.

Want to stand where Oppenheimer stood? Well, one day, perhaps, but for now, at least you can see it virtually. But what you won’t see, when that day comes, is the film about the lab, the secret town built around it, and the context in which it was created. Continue reading →

Lawprof Rick Hasen has been focused on election law long enough to know. He begins with a litany of internal problems.

In just the past few weeks, we learned that in the midst of the 2016 campaign the president’s eldest son, Donald J. Trump Jr., was willing to meet with a woman described to him as a “Russian government attorney” to get dirt on his father’s opponent. Voters across the country asked election officials to remove their names from voting rolls so that their personal information would not be turned over to the Orwellian Election Integrity commission that the president established to try to substantiate his outrageous and false charge that there were three million or more illegal voters in 2016. The president has stacked this commission with a rogues’ gallery of people with reputations for false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud. Democratic and Republican state officials have resisted the commission’s call to turn over voting lists.

Of course, there are problems like gerrymandering, felon disenfranchisement laws, voter identification law, which all serve to undermine the efficacy of the democratic process by either suppressing votes or negating them. Rick isn’t a big fan of Trump, however, so he puts that up top and then goes on to do his best to point to the sky, which will be falling any moment now.

And yet as bad as things are, the health of our electoral process is likely to deteriorate further, with some of the threats striking at the very basis of democratic society: our confidence that votes have been fairly and accurately counted. What’s worse, we cannot count on the courts, the president, Congress or state legislatures to save us. It will take bipartisan cooperation among state and local election officials, facilitated by nongovernmental organizations committed to sound principles of election administration, to get us past this dangerous point.

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The mantra “speech is violence” got a boost from Northeastern University psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, who sought to wrap up the argument in medical jargon to show that it’s not just feelz, but physiology.

But scientifically speaking, it’s not that simple. Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain — even kill neurons — and shorten your life.

After throwing out some medical words like proinflammatory cytokines and telomeres, she gets to her point: chronic stress. She then takes a grand leap of logic.

If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?

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At its core, the Washington Post op-ed by Brooklyn College President Michelle Anderson is a facial lie.

I’m a college president. Betsy DeVos should help me deal with campus sexual assault.

No college or university needs the “help” of the Department of Education to deal with campus sexual assault. If the DoE got out of the business of pushing colleges to twist Title IX altogether, it would have no impact whatsoever on the choices colleges make in handling accusations of sexual assault or rape. What the DoE has provided was cover, the means by which colleges could discriminate and blame it on the DoE. “Lhamon made me,” they could cry. But it’s just a lie.

As has been discussed here in excruciating detail, Title IX was never intended to morph into a campus adjudicatory system for the crimes of rape and sexual assault, but slid down the slippery slope until bureaucrats with radical agendas circumvented law to push their vision onto colleges.

Even McIntosh, despite her dodging and weaving, concedes that Catherine E. Lhamon, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights and head of the DoE Office of Civil Rights has gone off the reservation.  She has no lawful authority to mandate colleges and universities adhere to her political whims, as reflected in her “guidance,” upon pain of losing federal funds.*

When asked (see 1:37 in the video) who gave Lhamon the authority to impose her personal will upon the nation’s colleges and universities, she responded, “with gratitude, you did when I was confirmed.”

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Following a debate between Judges Kopf and Bennett over the whimsy of discretionary sentencing, the omni-geeky Jake DiMare came up with the idea of the Sentence-O-Matic 1000.

Judge Richard Kopf raised the question of whether the language was so devoid of meaning and guidance as to render § 3553(a) worthless.  Judge Mark Bennett responded “Sentencing requires us to weigh that which cannot be measured,” to which Judge Kopf replied: “Let’s be honest then and declare that sentencing is entirely a matter of discretion…”  If so, this raises the specter of sentencing being so arbitrary and capricious, so captive to any judge’s whim, as to be a total crapshoot.

Jake offered this reaction:

Was there ever a task in the courtroom more ripe for automation?

Jake had a point.Remove the feelz component from the mix and reduce sentencing to cold, hard empiricism.

As a representative of the ignorant masses, I find comfort in the notion that everyone would be given sentences using the same criteria, and never again subjected to the whimsy of some of the judges.

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The cops were looking for a big, bald, black man with a machete, so naturally they beat Tatyana Hargrove instead.

It so easy to understand the confusion. Continue reading →

As Jesse Eisinger portrays Preet Bharara in his upcoming book, “The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives,” he was a show pony who adored the spotlight and went for the low hanging fruit to become a public darling. The biggest notch on Preet’s gun was the former leader of New York’s Assembly, Shelly Silver. Silver was convicted on seven counts of corruption and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

The Second Circuit reversed and remanded.

It’s not that Silver didn’t engage in the conduct as alleged, but that Shelly Silver was the product of a long New York tradition, its roots going back to Boss Tweed, of New York politicians skirting the dirty. As Appellate Squawk explained at the time:

What has Silver done to deserve a murder sentence? You won’t find out from the media, dutifully delivering the prosecution’s press releases. “Bribery,” “kickback,” “extortion,”  “money laundering,” “scheme to defraud the public of honest services.”  You’d think he was some kind of Godfather putting horse’s heads in people’s beds.

Whether white-collar or no-collar, the names of criminal offenses are designed to conjure up horrifying visions vastly out of proportion to what the prosecution actually has to prove.  What could sound more wicked than “Scheme to Defraud the Public of Honest Services”? Visions of public works collapsing because they were built with Mafia cement. Little children going hungry because politicians are stealing their school lunches. But according to Caproni’s Jury instructions, “scheme” means only a plan to accomplish a goal and “defraud” simply means lying. It doesn’t matter if the public didn’t lose any money because of the “scheme.” It’s the idea of being lied to that deprives them of  the “intangible right of honest services.”

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As it happened, I was on the phone with Paul Nungesser’s lawyer, Andrew Miltenberg, when the Columbia Spectator got the story. This was a critical condition of the settlement, that Columbia University be the party to break the news in its own way, but once done, it was anybody’s game. For Columbia, the public relations piece was more important than any other, negotiating every vowel and comma of the statement to be publicly released. This is what they finally agreed upon:

Paul Nungesser and Columbia University have agreed to settle the lawsuit he filed in 2015.

While Paul was a student at Columbia, he was accused of sexual misconduct.  In November 2013, after a diligent and thorough investigation, Paul was found not responsible for any misconduct.  Columbia University stands by that finding.

In 2015, Paul graduated from Columbia in good standing as a distinguished John Jay Scholar.  John Jay Scholars, like Paul, are recognized for their remarkable academic and personal achievements, dynamism, intellectual curiosity, and original thinking.  Paul is currently enrolled at an internationally recognized film school and has launched a career as a filmmaker.

Columbia recognizes that after the conclusion of the investigation, Paul’s remaining time at Columbia became very difficult for him and not what Columbia would want any of its students to experience.  Columbia will continue to review and update its policies toward ensuring that every student – accuser and accused, including those like Paul who are found not responsible – is treated respectfully and as a full member of the Columbia community.

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Senior Nebraska District Judge Richard Kopf deconstructed an opinion by Southern District of West Virginia Judge Joseph Goodwin rejecting a plea agreement.

Greatly condensed and summarized, the judge recounted: (1) Walker’s stunning criminal history (although I think it likely because of the age of many of the prior convictions, and the maximum score limitation for certain relatively minor crimes, that Walker’s criminal history score was IV); (2) the fact that Walker warned his customers that other customers of his had overdosed; (3) the fact that the use of heroin and other opiates had risen to epidemic levels in West Virginia with the concomitant reality of a mounting death toll; (4) the fact that federal judges are not overworked so plea bargains are not necessary for the sake of judges; (5) that there is an inverse relationship between the increased number of federal prosecutors and each individual prosecutor’s caseload, thus suggesting that federal prosecutors do not need to plea bargain to handle their docket; (6) that the resolution of criminal charges by plea bargaining has replaced resolution by jury trial and that criminal jury trials in West Virginia (and throughout the nation) are few and far between; and (7) that jury trials provide an important public educational function.

Much of Judge Goodwin’s rationale deals with the quirks of the specific case, meaning that he just really hated the plea in this instance and thought it inappropriate. But the last two points are different. They are systemic issues, and as such, extend beyond the one plea agreement at issue to the broader question of whether pleas should be permitted at all, and who the court should be looking at when deciding whether to approve an agreement.

The first point is one often raised, that guilty pleas have replaced jury trials as the primary means of resolving indictments. This issue has been beaten to death, whether as the trial tax or the plea discount. Continue reading →

At Volokh Conspiracy, there has been a series of posts ripping to shreds a book about libertarianism by historian Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.

As Ilya Somin explains:

In her badly flawed book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, historian Nancy MacLean gets many, many things wrong about the history and purposes of libertarianism. Jonathan Adler, David Bernstein (see also here), Phil Magness (also here), Russell Roberts, and Michael Munger, and others, have highlighted some of her most important fallacies and distortions.

Rather than address the accusation that her book was substantively inaccurate, MacLean took to Facebook to attack the motives of her critics and call for social justice warriors to game the system in favor of the cause. Continue reading →